Introducing Guest Blogger Sonia Katyal

It is my great pleasure to introduce Professor Sonia Katyal, a Professor of Law at the Fordham School of Law, who will be guest blogging with us this month. Professor Katyal specializes in intellectual property and civil rights. She is a true wunderkind — one of the few young law professors in the country to claim more than four national awards for her work including a Warhol Grant, a Yale Cybercrime Award, a Dukeminier award for her writing on sexual orientation, and an honorable mention from the American Association of Law Schools.

Before joining Fordham Law’s faculty, Professor Katyal was an associate specializing in intellectual property litigation in the San Francisco office of Covington & Burling. She received her A.B. from Brown University in 1993, and her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1998. After law school, Prof. Katyal clerked for the Honorable Carlos Moreno (now a California Supreme Court Justice) in the Central District of California from 1998-99 and the Honorable Dorothy Nelson in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 1999-2000.

As her scholarship reflects, Professor Katyal is fascinated with how new media and popular culture depicts the law, and is also interested in how intellectual property law regulates popular culture. In 2010, Yale University Press published her book Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protestors Improve the Law of Ownership (Yale University Press, 2010), which she co-wrote with colleague Eduardo M. Peñalver. As CoOp guest Gordon Hull recently noted, in Property Outlaws, Peñalver and Katyal speak of a “conflicting divergence” in intellectual property law: “is a pirate an outlaw or a freedom fighter? The law asks, unable to offer a comprehensive answer.” Hull declared Property Outlaws“an ambitious and rigorously argued explanation of why this ambiguity is a good thing.” Katyal’s current project is a book called Contrabrand: Advertising, Art and Property in an Age of Corporate Identity, scheduled to come out from Yale in 2011, funded in part by the Warhol Foundation.